Open Mic Night (or week, month, year, era, age...)

Following days of Barbican-based pen-pushing, this is the way to dream away the remaining hours...


Hours filled with fairy lit basements of Eds, and the odd Ned.
And long Harringay hills and hot-pink florists.
Twilight consumed with cherry risotto and 'getting off one's Maynards'.
An evening wiled away with a beer keg baby, chit-chat of travel, egg-shaped shakers of a blue hue and playing, ad hoc, on the omnichord.
Time taken up by Portuguese aprons that exude culinary love, poems in profile (though which is his best side, one wonders, as he searches for the light), and printed pictures of Polaroid snaps.
Moments drowned in 'oceans of gin', whisky demands and red wine spillages.
A mortifying, though liberating, lifetime of stumbles through drunken mispronunciations, of misjudged french words, before taking one's leave half-heartedly with 'half past eight a.m.' excuses.

A blurred-edge bus journey, a 29 ride, an exchange of bohemian boasting between siblings, a panic and a pudding later... Panic due to forgotten keys and visions of street-sleeping. Pudding to soothe these (thankfully) unrealised visions away. Then wide-eyed once more at 4 in the morning.

I woke up and it was hours, not dreamed, but lived later. And it is these unexpected evenings that make the days of screen-staring more of a Barbican than a Barbican't.